[Scuddie]

I would beg to differ.  An XP, let alone 2k, office machine can easily get by with 256MB.  On the other hand, professional artist machines barely get by with 2 gigs.  Context is a beautiful thing.  For a general purpose machine, 256MB is just enough...  And I would not call running WoW with Photoshop in the background general purpose.

[WMCoolmon]

Hi.

Mr.XP Pro on a laptop with 128 MB ram here, works pretty well, although the constant VM usage is somewhat annoying.

[Scuddie]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
Hi.

Huh?  WTF was that?

[WMCoolmon]

The use of language to indicate a greeting, to notify others of one's entry into a conversation or the other's current area, or simply to call attention to oneself.

In this case, used to reinforce the feeling of introducing the individual as a subset of their personality, in specific the part with experience in using the operating system under discussion.

[CP5670]

Bye.

[kode]

Originally posted by WMCoolmon
The use of language to indicate a greeting, to notify others of one's entry into a conversation or the other's current area, or simply to call attention to oneself.

In this case, used to reinforce the feeling of introducing the individual as a subset of their personality, in specific the part with experience in using the operating system under discussion.

so... a/s/l?

[Kosh]

Win XP Pro on my laptop.

[TopAce]

I knew that XP would get the majority, but I wasn't expecting this proportion.

[Genryu]

XP SP1, ever more stripped down. Shell was replaced by Geoshell, Windows Explorer by 2xExplorer, killed more services than usual. When I don't have a reason to shut down the machine, it can runs up to a month without too much trouble, and last reinstall was a year ago, at the same time I changed the motherboard+processor.

[Flipside]

Funny thing I've have noticed about XP though, doesn't seem to like Networks unless every computer has the same type of Network card :/

Never had that problem with '98 funnily enough.

[mikhael]

Originally posted by Scuddie
I would beg to differ.  An XP, let alone 2k, office machine can easily get by with 256MB.  On the other hand, professional artist machines barely get by with 2 gigs.  Context is a beautiful thing.  For a general purpose machine, 256MB is just enough...  And I would not call running WoW with Photoshop in the background general purpose.

I disagree.

My job is doing outcall tech support. I come to your business and work on your machines, keep them clean, and running well. On an average day, I put my hands on twenty to thirty machines, and on some days its closer to sixty. Some are scratchbuilt, some are "name brand": IBM, Gateway, Dell, HP, etc. Some of the scratchbuilt ones are built by my company to the specifications of the client.

Many of my clients have 2k and XP machines in office settings. They aren't running much more than Office2k, OfficeXP, or Office2k3. I spend all day every day looking at these machines with only 256mb of RAM and answer questions about why the computer is so slow. Clean computers. Computers with no viruses, spyware, popup generators or adware. Slow. Invariably, the answer is, "you can run less stuff, or you can get more memory." Office users do not understand about closing application to free up RAM. They do not understand about GDI resource leaks. They don't understand anything beyond "its slow".

Naturally, you could get these machines to work comfortably in 256mb of RAM if you went through and disabled a bunch of services, trimmed a lot of OS fat, etc. However, these aren't machines run by tweakers, they're business users working business offices.

"Context", as you put it, is a wonderful thing--when its applied properly. In this case, the context is what's listed above. I stand by my minimum of 512mb with at least 1gb being the preferrence.

As an aside, the two studios of professional artists I support (one uses primarily Mac G4s and G5s, the other uses scratchbuilt PCs), are more modest than you might think: the only machines with more than 1.5gb are the rendering farm servers, which all ahve 4gb.